From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri 02 Dec 2005 - 02:00:34 GMT
At 01:35 PM 11/30/2005 -0800, you wrote:
>This article appeared in the October 24 edition of Time. Can be interpreted
>in terms of memetic engineering. Follows the standard approach of
>conflating mind with brain. Quotes a researcher asking how the brain makes
>decisions about what car to buy or what to have for lunch, thereby placing
>us in our brains instead of the other way around.
>
>--TD
>
>Getting inside your head
>
>By Terry McCarthy
>
>Marketers already seem to know a lot about how we think, but what if they
>could actually watch our brains work as they test their products? A recent
>experiment by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine,
>may be laying the groundwork for just that. In an experiment last year, he
There is a funny story behind this. Back in May of 2004 I was at a
conference where Dr. Montague was reporting on several experiments. This
was not among them, but he told us about it informally. It seems the
experiment was suggested/designed by his daughter--who I think was about
14. She gets credit as an author of the paper, McClure, SM, Li, J, Tomlin,
D, Cypert, KS, Montague, LM, Montague, RM (2004) "Neural correlates of
behavioral preference for culturally familiar drinks." Neuron 44:379-387
"Out of the mouths of . . "
Keith Henson
>scanned volunteers' brains as they drank samples of Coke and Pepsi. When the
>colas were not identified, the tasters showed no particular preference for
>either. But when they were shown the iconic red-and-white label, they
>expressed a huge preference for Coke, irrespective of which cola they were
>actually sampling. Coke's logo, the scans showed, lit up areas in the brain
>associated with pleasure expectation in a way that Pepsi's did not.
>Montague's conclusion: Coke's more pervasive brand marketing affected
>volunteers' preferences in ways they didn't realize--even if they were
>normally Pepsi drinkers.
>
>Get ready for an Era of the Brain. New scanning techniques are making it
>easier to determine how our minds work and creating hopes in the corporate
>world that companies can make new connections with customers--and duplicate
>the Coke effect. The breakthrough behind all that is the development of
>functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the latest in neuroimaging
>technology, which displays not only the structure of the brain but also how
>it actually functions, by measuring its blood flow. In the scans, specific
>areas of the brain light up as various mental processes occur. Although the
>technology is still in its infancy, the potential for looking inside the
>mind is already attracting researchers from other disciplines. Hybrid fields
>like neuroethics and neuroeconomics are emerging so rapidly that neuro may
>well become investors' next hot prefix. (So long, nano?)
>
>What's creating the most excitement is a project called the International
>Consortium for Brain Mapping, a 12-year collaborative effort to create an
>atlas of the human brain, based on scans of 7,000 brains from three
>continents. Coordinated by John Mazziotta, who runs the Ahmanson-Lovelace
>Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, the brain atlas is due to be released online
>next year. Data are being stored and analyzed on a supercomputer at UCLA
>with 1 petabyte of capacity--equivalent to a book with 250 billion pages.
>"They are laying the groundwork for all other brain studies to come," says
>Allan Jones, of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
>
>The immediate benefit would be at the clinical level. The atlas would give
>researchers and physicians around the world access to virtual maps of how
>the brain functions, to compare with data they obtain from scans of their
>subjects or patients. By the end of next year, they should be able to
>project local scans free of charge into the online atlas via a computer
>technique called "warping." That will immediately show if some part of the
>brain appears to be working abnormally, compared with norms established by
>the scans of the 7,000 "healthy" brains. "We can do very tight matches. For
>example, you could look for all left-handed Chinese women in their 20s with
>two years of college and make a match," says Mazziotta. The atlas' scanning
>techniques could also be used to speed drug trials, since researchers could
>compare images of the brain before, during and after the administration of a
>new medication--and then compare those images with brains in the atlas.
>
>But the atlas should also provide a springboard for a broader range of
>experiments. "Neuroimaging is more than finding the next drug for anxiety,"
>says Allan Schore, a neuroscientist at the UCLA David Geffen School of
>Medicine. "We can study empathy, trust, deception, emotional communication,
>regulation of violence--issues that are central to human existence."
>
>Neuroimaging is also extending into the fields of politics and commerce. Tom
>Freedman, a former senior adviser to the Clinton Administration, along with
>his brother Joshua, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, last year founded FKF
>Applied Research, a company that uses fMRI to study decision making. In the
>run-up to the presidential election, they found differences in brain
>activity between Bush and Kerry voters when they were shown political
>advertisements. The Freedmans are also studying leadership qualities, by
>looking at how people's brains respond to an image of someone they would be
>willing to follow compared with that of someone they wouldn't. Both studies
>could help politicians hone their campaign messages to appeal more
>effectively to voters.
>
>Corporate America, meanwhile, is hoping brain scanning can help sales. "The
>big question for neuroeconomics is, How does the human brain make decisions
>like which car to buy or what to have for lunch," says Antonio Rangel,
>director of the neuroeconomics lab at Stanford. Research is showing that the
>limbic system, which governs emotions, often overrides the logical areas of
>the brain, suggesting that the "rational actor" theory of economics misses
>deeper sources of motivation rooted in unconscious feelings and
>interpersonal dynamics. Instead of aiming at consumers' logical
>decision-making processes, companies could perhaps appeal to the fuzzier
>side of how people feel about themselves and others around them.
>
>Steven Quartz, director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at
>Caltech, is one of many experts moving into neuromarketing. He is helping
>Hollywood studios select trailers for new movies by scanning viewers as they
>watch a series of scenes to see which ones elicit the strongest reactions in
>the parts of the brain that are associated with reward expectations. Quartz,
>who works in partnership with market-research company Lieberman Research
>Worldwide, is similarly scanning consumers to identify emotional reactions
>to TV commercials and to products' packaging design.
>
>Neuromarketing has its share of critics. Gary Ruskin, executive director of
>Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group that Ralph Nader set up to monitor
>commercial forces in society, sent letters to the U.S. Senate Commerce
>Committee in July 2004 calling for an investigation into the practice.
>Commercial Alert says it fears neuromarketers could "peer into our brains"
>and control our buying behavior. Joshua Freedman of FKF says such fears are
>misplaced. "Some people view this like Frankenstein and brain control, but I
>think that science, by trying to understand what goes on in human brains,
>should be very freeing by helping people understand how they make
>decisions."
>
>"This technology is unstoppable," says Stanford's Rangel. That is precisely
>what motivated Mazziotta to set up the atlas project in the first place:
>with the proliferation of scanning, there was a flood of information about
>the brain but nowhere to put it. "Up to now there has been no way to compare
>imaging work done in one lab to another, or from one person to another. We
>needed to have some way to organize all this data." The trick now is to
>figure out how best to use it.
>
>
>
>===============================================================
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
>For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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